Great to see Alan Ramsay back at the Sydney Morning Herald, out of retirement (?). It's possible that the SMH decided it needed a bit more substantial meat to its commentaries on the news and on politics, as some of its younger opinionators are mostly fence sitters. Their butt must be hurting.

Andrew Cockburn has written a must-read book. The title is Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins. The title could just as well be: How the US Government and US Military Became Murder, Inc.

If only the 24 women murdered by their partners or former partners in Australia so far this year had died in a plane crash we might hear about them and have some debate about how to address this systemic issue.

Oo roo Malcolm Fraser, the King Of Nareen

got the best stock prices Vic's ever seen

by lowering the fences in his stockyard

Wool over eyes, without pulling too hard

 

Oo roo Malcolm Fraser, Straya's Prime Minister

clambering to power by methods quite sinister

Threw out Whitlam and his social reform

Made back-stabbing Canberra's political norm

 

Oo Roo Malcolm Fraser, noted Humanitarian

imagine... A former atheist raises hell into promoting beliefs in Christianity... And a Republican senator, Paul Broun, a medical doctor by training, claims that "All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell."

We’re squeezed in, hundreds of sweaty bodies pressed against one another in the aptly named Greenhouse tent. It’s 30 December 2014, and two days of tropical downpours have been followed by a full day’s searing heat. We’re at Woodford Folk Festival, north-west of Brisbane, waiting to hear a speaker. It’s either deliciously tropical or downright disgusting in here, depending on your frame of mind.

Our politicians have paltry ideas and express them poorly ….

So the Palmer United Party (PUP) has exploded into its constituent fragments, leaving its founder and one apparently reluctant acolyte in the Senate to act as leader, whip, bottle washer – whatever.

Malcolm Fraser: An unrelenting critic of the Liberal party until the end

 

The response of Tony Abbott's colleagues to his latest wilful overreach at the dispatch box in parliament was unmistakable.

By the time the punchy Prime Minister was on his feet again just minutes later, the air had been sucked from the government balloon. Rarely have iPhones, tablets, and even constituent mail been so universally compelling.